CINCINNATI — An Ohio nurse was sentenced Tuesday to the maximum 10 years in prison after she unexpectedly pleaded guilty in the malnutrition death of a 14-year-old girl who had cerebral palsy and weighed 28 pounds when she died.

Mollie Parsons, 42, had been set to go to trial Wednesday in the 2011 death of Makayla Norman.

Instead, Parsons pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, failing to provide for a functionally impaired child, and tampering with records.

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The plea was not part of an agreement with prosecutors and did not win Parsons leniency. She had faced as little as three years in prison.

It was Parsons’ job to care for Makayla six days a week at the Dayton home where the girl lived with her mother, prosecutors said.

The teen had numerous bedsores and was living in filthy conditions when she died from nutritional and medical neglect complicated by cerebral palsy, authorities said.

‘‘She basically starved to death,’’ Montgomery County Prosecutor Mat Heck said Tuesday. Parsons ‘‘had a duty, a responsibility, an oath that she took as a nurse to care for people, and in this particular case, this is one of the most dependent victims she would ever come in contact with in her entire life, and she simply failed to do anything,” Heck said.